The poetic function and aesthetic qualities: cognitive poetics and the Jakobsonian model

Abstract

According to Jakobson, the poetic function forces readers or listeners more than other linguistic functions to attend to the signifiers in linguistic signs, away from the signifieds. This it does by superimposing similarity on contiguity. As to aesthetic qualities, when you say “The music is sad”, or “This poem is sad”, you do not refer to a mental process of the music or the poem, but report that you have detected a structural resemblance between an emotion and the music or the poem. This is their aesthetic quality, Similarity between linguistic units in a continuous text may be exploited so as to display a perceptual quality that has a structural resemblance to human emotions. Within this theoretical framework, the paper explores how landscape descriptions can have a structural resemblance to human emotions; how rhyme and acoustic energy may contribute to emotional qualities; how Jakobson's distinction between babbling and the arbitrary referential sign may illuminate poetic language; how alliteration may distinguish poetic from other kinds of language, but also hypnotic from other kinds of poetry; finally, it will account for the artificiality of visual patterning in poetry, but also for its relationship to mysticism.

Keywords:

• cognition
• poetic function
• equivalence
• rhyme
• reader-response
• metaphorical and metonymical poles in language

Notes

¹ My doubts are based on four kinds of consideration. First, if my foregoing analysis is plausible, the nonreferential construal of the superimposed sound pattern is the unmarked one, and the referential construal bears the burden of proof. Second, assigning two rival, unrelated meanings to the sound sequence Eulalia should render the line witty. Do we indeed experience the line as witty? Third, what do we gain by assigning to the first two sounds of the predicate the meaning of the second person pronoun (already explicit in the subject)? Fourth, a sound pattern to which no meaning is assigned remains unique, unclassifiable, “meaningless” sensory information. In literary responce, as in life, there may be a reluctance to be exposed to unique, unclassifiable, sensory information.

² “Meaning” and “referent” are not the same thing. Consider the following two phrases: “the president who plays the saxophone” and “the president who is said to have had an affair with Monica Lewinsky”. They have diferent meanings, but refer to the same person.